I’m honored to be the composer for Rachelle Bacani’s touching, heartfelt animated short about grief.

During quarantine I created this work, an homage to Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room.”

It’s quite unlike my other compositions, and that’s what I like about it.

Hindustani classical music uses a system known as rāga for the melodic organization of compositions and improvisations. A rāga has an ascending form and descending form, which can twist and turn on the way to the octave, including multiple versions of scale steps (e.g. sharp 4, natural 4) as well as a primary note and a secondary note.

One way a rāga may be theoretically classified is with the thāt system. A thāt is a scale, with none of the melodic sophistication of a rāg.

Hindustani music uses a tonic drone as a harmonic reference for the rāga melody, without chords or chord progressions. What happens if we harmonize a thāt?

Six of the ten thāt are the same as the European church modes. Three of them include an embedded major pentatonic scale, and which gives them a polytonal power. Below, three harmonization worksheet videos demonstrate these scales in a harmonic context.

Music is organized sound.

On it’s surface, this answer is incredibly dry. How could music, which inspires so much emotion and passion in us, have such a cold, sterile definition?

Why would anyone want to organize sound? Why would anyone want to listen to organized sound? Is it possible, and does it matter, if the listener and organizer have different answers to these questions? What is the relationship between music and the rest of our lives? To poetry? To narrative? To dance? To emotion? Isn’t language also organized sound? What does a piece of music mean? What do we mean by a “piece” of music? Is musical meaning universal or context-dependent? How do facts about acoustics, biology, cognition, memory, the overtone series, and time relate to music theory, practice, and experience?

I would like to explore these questions.

The award-winning documentary “American Circumcision,” with a score by yours truly, is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.